Manufacturers Continue to Improve the Basketball Goal

Paul Steinbach Headshot

It all began, the time-honored story goes, with a peach basket plucked from a janitor's closet. Given two weeks to develop an indoor activity to occupy students at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., during brutal New England winters, Canadian-born physical-education instructor James Naismith hung the basket on the railing of a running track, which happened to be suspended 10 feet above the gymnasium floor. With the addition of a soccer ball, a second basket and a baker's dozen playing rules, basketball was born in December 1891.

It was a slow game, to say the least, with each goal requiring retrieval of the ball by individuals ascending ladders or poking broomsticks through the basket bottom from below. Metal rims had emerged by 1893, but open-bottom nets weren't in vogue for another 11 years. It's little wonder, then, that the first college basketball game, played January 18, 1896, was a low-scoring affair, with the University of Chicago outlasting Iowa, 15-12.

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